The May Beetles

by Schwartz, Baba;

  From inside the cellar, we heard a truck arrive: the grinding of gears, the slamming of doors. The boots of soldiers thudded on the floor above us – six or seven of them, possibly more. We heard their voices: one was telling my mother in German that the Red Army was requisitioning the house for the following day and night. ‘For a day and a night?’ she asked in disbelief. I could tell from the pause before she spoke how distressing this news was to her.

  The soldier talking to my mother paced about while he was speaking. I heard his footfalls stop. He rapped the floor above us with the heel of his boot. ‘What is below?’ he said to my mother. She made no spoken reply. Maybe she was shaking her head, as if in ignorance of what the soldier was talking about. Then came the scraping of chairs being moved.

  The soldier lifted the trapdoor. We could see him but he couldn’t see us. He called for the Ukrainian and ordered him to climb down the steps. He may have been taking precautions in case German soldiers were hidden below. Once the Ukrainian was halfway down, the soldier descended. He shone a flashlight beam about until it settled on Marta, Erna and me, huddled together in fear. He told the Ukrainian to stay where he was, then called to us to come up the steps. We did as we were told.

  My mother was standing tall in the kitchen, while the soldiers stood about looking puzzled but pleased. Four attractive women, all of a sudden! The officer took us to the room where the ill-tempered old man lay on his bed. ‘Who’s he?’ he asked in German.

  ‘A Pole,’ my mother said. ‘He was here when we came.’

  ‘Came from where?’ the officer asked.

  She didn’t answer. No doubt she was considering whether to reveal that we were Jews who had once been at Auschwitz. We girls looked to her for guidance. We had hidden our red stars so assiduously for all this time, and now, when it became safe to reveal them, caution stopped us from doing so.

  ‘All right, sit down,’ said the officer. He could see that my mother had something to say but would need coaxing.

  We sat on the chairs and on the side of the bed of the old man, who stared at one then another of us with his customary malice. The officer told us in his basic German that he would have the Russian-speaking Ukrainian translate what he had to say to us, and he called the man into the room. We had to hope that he would translate what Mother said faithfully. We didn’t trust him at all; he had kept himself aloof from us over the whole period of our time at the farmhouse. But maybe he would be too frightened to distort what was being said. As a Ukrainian, he had reason to feel in some danger: the Russians correctly considered the Ukrainians to have been collaborators with the Nazis.

  The officer folded his arms and nodded at my mother. ‘So tell me,’ he said.

  My mother began by declaring that we were Jews. ‘Jews escaped from hell,’ she said. ‘For the Germans have been killing Jews in great numbers. We were sent to Auschwitz in the south, where many Jews were murdered, and also many Russian prisoners of war. Then the Germans sent some of us women here to the north to work for them.’

  Once Mother had told part of our story, we felt free to chime in with details of our own, encouraged by the sympathetic expression on the face of the officer. We showed him the identification numbers on strips of fabric that we’d been ordered to sew on the sleeves of our garments back in Auschwitz – 37896, 37897, 37898 and 37899, as well as Annushka’s number, 37900, which we had saved. And we displayed the red stars on the back of our Auschwitz dresses. The officer nodded at intervals and his growing understanding became apparent. Sometimes, instead of nodding, he shook his head, as if in shock and disbelief.

  ‘On the road,’ said Mother, ‘many of us were shot. If we became sick, we were shot. If we stumbled, we were shot.’ When she wished to demonstrate being shot, she raised an imaginary rifle to her shoulder.

  The other Russian soldiers stood at the doorway, captivated. All of us grew excited as we talked. Not once since our expulsion from Nyírbátor had we been in a position to tell our story to a sympathetic listener, other than to those like us, who were enduring the same ordeal.

  The Russians began talking too, and adopted my mother’s demonstrative method of storytelling. They acted out their questions for us with gestures and dumb show. For some reason the whole business was highly animating: together we were constructing a complicated story without a common language.

  One word common to both the Russians and to us was ‘Fritz’ – the stereotypical name for any German, just as ‘Ivan’ was the de facto name for any Russian. We had somehow come to believe that another word the Russians used repeatedly – voyna – meant ‘hungry’. Actually, it meant ‘war’; God knows how we so mangled the meaning. At one point in the chaotic exchange my mother said, ‘Fritz voyna! Ja, Fritz voyna!’ What she was trying to say was that the Germans were hungry and defeated, with the inference that the brave Russian soldiers had conquered them.

  The old man in the bed had been listening intently, subduing his anger and disgust, but he must have known this Russian word voyna. All at once his loathing got the better of him, for he thought Mother was saying that this was a ‘German war’, a ‘Fritz war’. He sat upright in his bed and screamed, ‘Nyet Fritz voyna! Zsid voyna! Jude voyna!’ (‘Not a Fritz war! A Yid war! A Jewish war!’) His face was twisted in rage; there were flecks of spittle on his lips.

  We stared at him in amazement. To start with, we didn’t know why he felt compelled to make this ludicrous claim, but moreover why he should risk his life by revealing his love of the Germans and his hatred of Jews at such a time. The Russians responded to the old man’s outburst in quite a different way. Angered, they seized him, wrenched him from his bed and readied their rifles to shoot him.

  Seeing what was about to happen, we rushed to intervene, and pleaded for the old man to be spared. He was a vile old man but still we did not want him shot. If the old man one day faced a higher judgement, well and good. But his blood should not be on our hands.

  CHAPTER 20

  Marienwerder

  In the end, we accepted that we couldn’t remain at the farmhouse. The Russian officer told us to take ourselves to a building that had been commandeered as the headquarters for the Red Army in the region – the ‘Commandantura’, as it was known. It was in a town some eight kilometres away. Once there, we would be required to register as refugees. The personnel at the Commandantura would consider our case and maybe find us lodgings. We were now no longer runaway Jews in danger of falling into the hands of the Nazis, but displaced persons likely to be considered simply nuisances alongside tens of thousands of other nuisances.

  On the road to the Commandantura we passed Russian soldiers on their march towards Germany. They were a disorderly horde, and we quickly learned to dread them with almost as much intensity as we dreaded the SS. We knew we should be grateful to them for chasing the Germans out of our lives, but they looked like the cohorts of the Barbarian army on its way to sack Rome. The mixture of physical types was striking: slant-eyed Tartars, dark-skinned Armenians, Russians of the steppes with oddly upturned noses.

  The Commandantura was located in a large family house, which was bursting at the seams with refugees, all with tales to tell the Russian officers. We overheard many people’s stories as we waited our turn. The Russians had taken over the functions of the judiciary and the police, so they would intervene and restore order when necessary. The refugees told of rape, of theft, of Russian soldiers who had abandoned all discipline and given themselves over to their appetites. The officers were not much moved by the tales of rape and theft, but they were willing to register people as refugees.

  When our turn came we were duly registered. It occurred to Mother to ask if there was any employment available, and it turned out there was. Mother and Erna were told to report to a cheese factory nearby. Marta was considered too weak to take on employment, and my bandaged arm and healing wound ruled me out.

  Marta and I remained at the Commandantura while Mother and Erna took themselves off to the cheese f
actory. Their tasks were simple enough – washing huge rounds of hard cheese in an acidic solution that contributed to the ageing – but the hours were long and extended into the evening. The physical toll on both of them was great. All of us were suffering from boils on our bodies and from other aches and pains that had developed over months of inadequate nutrition, but it was particularly hard for my mother and sister, who stood on their aching legs for twelve-hour shifts. Other women and men, as wretched as us, also laboured away at the cheese factory.

  We camped at the Commandantura overnight, and the next day Mother and Erna prepared for more toil. The stitches in my hand required attention, and Marta, who had never fully recovered from her fever and chilblains, also needed to be seen to by a doctor. Before she went off to work, Mother found a female Russian officer who gave us a sympathetic hearing. She directed us to a field hospital, where a doctor removed my stitches and dressed the wound again with a smaller bandage. Marta was examined, but whatever she was suffering from – probably typhus – couldn’t be properly treated.

  Afterwards we returned to the Commandantura to inform the female officer of our success in finding the field hospital. I don’t know why we thought it necessary to do this, because the Commandantura was a dangerous place for us to be alone. There was a steady flow of Russian soldiers, all eager to find a girl with whom they could enjoy themselves. Marta and I were certainly noticed; we were referred to as ‘the two pretty vengerkas’ (the Russian word for Hungarian girls, as we learnt).

  That day I grabbed Marta’s hand and pulled her along as I searched for somewhere we could hide. In one empty room I found a big wooden wardrobe with doors that closed securely. I stuffed Marta inside, forced myself in and pulled the doors shut. We listened in a state of near hysteria as the soldiers stomped about, searching for the vengerkas. The air inside the wardrobe stunk, and it was hot. Poor Marta was as weak as a kitten, and terrified.

  After some hours huddled in the wardrobe, we heard a commotion: the gruff voices of soldiers, the cries of a young female. The distress of the girl made it apparent that she was being raped. I squeezed my eyes shut to intensify the darkness, as if this would hide me more completely. I prayed in silence for my mother to appear and somehow make the dread go away.

  But we avoided the soldiers and survived the night. The next morning we met up again with Mother and Erna, who by now were convinced that Marta and I had disappeared. Our mother’s relief when she saw us reduced her to tears.

  The next day Mother went to see the Russian officer who was in charge of the cheese factory and said that the boils on her legs and Erna’s made the time they spent standing at the trough washing cheeses a kind of torture. The officer was Jewish, and in fact bore a strong physical resemblance to my father. He allowed Mother to summarise (in Yiddish) the abuses she and her daughters had endured under the Nazis. He listened without any great sympathy. No doubt he had seen the death camps in his journey across Poland with his comrades, but he was unmoved. ‘Madam, the war isn’t over yet,’ he said. ‘We all have our duties.’ For him the dogma of the Soviet state was stronger than the bond between Jews. And yet there was a happy outcome eventually: two weeks later my mother and Erna were transferred to a new workplace.

  That new workplace was in the town of Kwidzyn, known in German as Marienwerder, back across the Vistula, one hundred kilometres south of Danzig. We travelled there by train. All of us were to be employed in a hospital in the vicinity of the town, where we would be stitching the military uniforms of shot Russian soldiers. Sewing machines were provided. We patched up the uniforms in the same way that surgeons patched up people; just as the surgeons sent the repaired people back to war, so we sent the repaired uniforms back to the soldiers.

  Our lodgings at Marienwerder were a vast improvement on the Commandantura. We had an entire apartment in a big block, and we were the only tenants in the building. It was the last week of April 1945, and the spring sunshine streamed in through the windows of our first-floor flat, warming everything. Below us in the street, the Russian soldiers whom we had so feared a few days earlier were laughing and singing and playing tunes on harmonicas. One song in particular I adored, a Mexican folk song that had become famous all over the world. I began to hum the tune myself for the sheer pleasure of it.

  In their celebrations, the soldiers wandered the streets of Marienwerder dressed comically in anything outrageous they could find in the empty dwellings of the town, even women’s garments – shawls, silk dresses, women’s hats. These soldiers had survived the war; their enemies, the Germans, were only a few days away from annihilation. Of course, some of the Russians were still perfectly capable of seizing women and girls and raping them, but in Marienwerder we could at least lock the door of our apartment against them. And the Russians here were less coarse, by and large, than those we’d encountered earlier. Most were gentlemen.

  So for the first time we had a certain degree of comfort. What we ate was provided by the hospital: for breakfast sweet semolina cooked in fresh milk, served with freshly baked bread. And for dinner mince meat encased in pasta – a type of ravioli – smothered in delicious sauces. I can’t say that I have ever relished food as much in my life as I did in Marienwerder.

  From the room in which we worked at our sewing machines, we had a clear view into the brightly lit operating theatre of the hospital. The surgeons were kept busy day and night with casualties from the battlefield, even at this very late stage of the war. One of us would say, looking up from work, ‘Dear God, now see what they’re doing!’ Usually they were amputating limbs too badly chewed up to be saved.

  As seamstresses in Marienwerder, we were content to keep mending uniforms until we were repatriated home to Hungary. The only blight on our happy change of circumstances at this time came in the form of three Polish women, who were sent to live and work with us at the hospital. The eldest was about thirty, and ill-educated and coarse, and I could not feel any welcome in my heart for them. They said that they’d been working in Germany, that they’d become prisoners, and that the Russians had found them and sent them back to Poland.

  The eldest of the three, Natasha, turned out to be an epileptic. One evening, as I was enjoying dinner with my mother and sisters at the kitchen table, Natasha came crashing through the door and fell to the floor, convulsing violently. We didn’t think of epilepsy just at that moment; we thought Natasha had gone berserk, and we stood up ready to defend ourselves. Neither Natasha nor the other Polish girls had mentioned her epilepsy to us, so the episode frightened the daylights out of us. They didn’t care what we thought – Natasha least of all.

  Natasha regularly brought soldiers back to her bed at night – we all shared the one bedroom – and we were compelled to listen to the entertainment she provided for them. When my mother could stand it no longer, she upbraided Natasha. ‘Is this the way to behave? Do you not see anything wrong in bringing your boyfriends here, where decent young women are sleeping? You are deplorable – tactless and tasteless.’ Natasha merely shrugged, although she did find somewhere else to carry out her business.

  It was in Marienwerder that I made a friend, Sasha. He was a Russian soldier who had until recently been a prisoner of the Germans, meaning that he would have suffered dreadfully. God knows how he survived, since the Germans murdered hundreds of thousands of their Russian prisoners. Sasha was a patient at the hospital, and he had noticed me when I came with one of the Polish girls to collect our food from the soldiers’ mess hall there. He had made enquiries: ‘That girl with the dark hair and the blue eyes – where does she live?’ The Polish girl told him, and he came to visit me.

  Sasha had a round, pleasant face, and he wore round glasses. He was quiet, educated, intelligent, well mannered and a little shy – everything that most Russian soldiers were not. ‘Ochky Sasha’, he came to be called – ‘Sasha-with-the-specs’. He saw something in me that delighted him, I am happy to say – we were kindred spirits. He came often to the apartment to see me, and also
Mother and Erna and Marta. We chatted with as much enjoyment as I could remember, mostly about books and poetry. I wouldn’t say we were boyfriend and girlfriend, although that sort of attraction was certainly there. We didn’t kiss – we didn’t even touch – but we loved each other. We spoke sweetly to each other, and at every meeting he had something flattering to say about my looks, about my mind. Sasha was an honourable man who wished me to know that I would never find in him the sort of slobbering appetites that I had seen in his compatriots.

  Sasha spoke competent German after his time in the POW camps, so with my bits and pieces of the language we were able to converse without strain. And he taught me Russian – how to speak it, read it and even write it. Even in the relatively short period of our friendship, Sasha’s instruction gave me a good grasp of his native language.

  The time came, inevitably, when Sasha was well enough to leave the hospital and rejoin his regiment. Having been a prisoner of war, he needed to redeem himself in the eyes of his fellow soldiers and officers, since it was considered a disgrace for a Russian soldier to be captured. Later, he wrote me lovely letters in Russian, at first in carefully composed Cyrillic print, then in longhand. I was able to read them without any great effort, and they thrilled and uplifted me. Whenever he wrote the phrase ‘I love you’, he put the words into Hungarian – Szeretlek – but in Cyrillic script. I still have the five letters he sent me.

  My mother and my sisters also picked up enough Russian to allow us to converse with the soldiers, and that made everything easier. In fact, our lives were altogether so much easier than at any time over the past year. We even managed to add a few items to our household by wandering around Marienwerder and inspecting the interiors of the many empty houses in the town. We didn’t consider that we were looting. These empty places had been abandoned by ethnic Germans fleeing the Russians, and would very likely remain abandoned. Some of the orphaned items we adopted were merely practical – kitchen utensils and the like – but some were lovely, such as an exquisite pearl embroidery which is now framed and displayed in my home. My mother kept for many years a small blue crystal vase she found in a Marienwerder house.